Mapping Buildings and Burials at Gloucester Town

Recent blog with the Fairfield Foundation:

Aerial view of Gloucester Point VIMS campus, with burial locations indicated

What happens to archaeological collections and associated documentation when the dig is over? Two weeks ago, fellow Colleen Betti wrote about her analysis of collections from the large slave quarter yards and midden at Fairfield (click here to read Colleen’s blog). Colleen’s research will culminate in a senior honor’s thesis at the College of William and Mary, which will be available to future researchers through Swem library. In a similar way, salvage and contract archaeology often concludes with a comprehensive technical report. In Virginia, these reports are available in the Department of Historical Resources (DHR) archives in Richmond. Archaeologists planning new field projects consult these site reports in order to get a glimpse of what other researchers learned and perhaps what they can expect from excavations. But what happens when numerous organizations and contract firms have excavated in the same area? It becomes much more difficult to piece together the history of a place and its residents unless all the various research has been synthesized.

Over the past year and a half, I have been working with the Fairfield Foundation to research the history and archaeology of Gloucester Point. In particular, we are interested in Gloucester Town, a thriving colonial port located on the York River and the present-day site of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS). Gloucester Town’s history of archaeological excavation extends back decades, primarily spurred by the expansion of the VIMS campus. These efforts led the placement of the Gloucester Point Archaeological District on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. As a colonial port town, it has great comparative potential with sites like Colchester, recently excavated by Fairfax County archaeologists, and Yorktown, just across the river. Our goal is to add to the extensive body of research on Gloucester Point, writing “biographies” of Gloucester Town residents, overlaying historic plat maps on the landscape, and relocating previously-excavated archaeological features using GIS.

The high density of human burials is an endemic problem for archaeologists at Gloucester Point. While some contract firms elected to shift construction in order to preserve burials in situ, other firms fully excavated human remains, taking advantage of their research potential. Between 1983 and 2005, more than thirty burials were uncovered within the confines of historic Gloucester Town. My goal? Map each burial location – whether or not an individual is still interred on that site – in order to preserve extant human burials and determine known burial areas. The challenge? Mapping technology in the 1980s and 90s doesn’t come close to what we use today. I scanned site maps from the DHR, geo-referencing them (transforming them to a known coordinate system using a set of control points) in ArcGIS. I then digitized burial features, entering reference data in an associated table. The result? A clean map of burial locations on the VIMS campus, indicating key areas of historic burial concentrations. In particular, I note an area where seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gloucester Town inhabitants were interred, a Revolutionary War era cemetery associated with Cornwallis’ siege of Yorktown and Gloucester Town, and a nineteenth-century burying ground postdating Gloucester Town. 

Beyond these goals, I have been researching the mortuary contexts and skeletal biology of individuals interred at Gloucester Point, contextualizing data using social history – a research model I take from Julie King and Douglas Ubelaker’s report at Patuxent Point, Maryland. I hope that this research – and the contributions of other Fairfield Foundation staff and volunteers – will add to the rich history of Gloucester and the Chesapeake region.

Where is Four Corners, really?

I visited the Four Corners monument on a family vacation in 2004, then again in October 2010.  It's not much to see - you pay three dollars per person to take your picture at a very ostentatious monument that's located on Navajo tribal land.  (Not until after the second visit did I discover the joys of frybread.)  This place is in the middle of nowhere.  Really, I mean it.

The middle of Nowhere (actually a nice place to visit)

Since the 2004 trip, I had heard rumors that the monument was actually misplaced when initial surveying was done in the 19th century. When Paul and I were driving through the area last October, my GPS placed the monument squarely in New Mexico.  As I was doing some of my geography reading a few weeks ago, Four Corners flashed into my mind.

Since Earth has a very irregular shape, geodicists (people who study the Earth's shape) create models called ellipsoids to make calculating geographic locations easier.  When a new ellipsoid called GRS 80 replaced the previously-used Clarke 1866 ellipsoid, the geographic coordinates for specific locations changed, usually between 10 and 100 meters.  But when I thought a little harder, I realized that this would in no way explain the supposed 2.5 mile discrepancy in the location of Four Corners.  So I did a google search, and found this article from the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), vehemently defending the accurate location of the monument.

I searched for the geographic coordinates, converted them to decimal degrees, and created the Mercator projection below showing the location of Four Corners.

Penn State Oneline GIS Education, 2011.

Next I checked google maps:

And there it is - right where it's supposed to be!  I suppose I really should believe the NGS after all.  And I suppose that means that even though Paul and I did not take any epic hail-showering voyages through Utah, he has, in fact, set foot in the state.  Or at least, on sovereign tribal land that just happens to fall in the state of Utah...

Oh Paul.  You would.

Sojourner

The past few weeks have been almost Colleen Earp-esque.  In the past nine days, I've been to seven states and the District.  That's a lot of places.  Yet somehow, I haven't felt like an itinerant (or a Soujourner, if you prefer) as much as I have in the past.  Perhaps I've gotten used to this roving lifestyle - or maybe I've learned to think of home as a state of being rather than a place.

Thursday: Virginia to Maryland (my daily commute to work).  Maryland to Virginia (my daily commute home).  Virginia to Maryland (drove with Mom and Dad to my brother's house in Annapolis, to drop off our furry golden friends).  Maryland to Pennsylvania (drove to Harrisburg, where we stopped for dinner).  Harrisburg to Selinsgrove (Grandma's, where we stopped for the night).

Friday: Pennsylvania to Michigan (it snowed the whole way), where we stayed for a couple days with my brother (the other one) and sister-in-law (and their two adorable kids).  Favorite memory: playing with my niece Kiera, who, like any respectable four-year-old, has inexhaustible energy.  I'm pretty sure I changed gender and/or species a number of times during our "adventures" (and that was just over about an hour!)

(The next) Saturday: Virginia to New Jersey (with Paul, of course) for a family get-together, which was thankfully not snowed out this time.  I must say, Paul's family is pretty awesome.  My fondness for New Jersey has grown over the past few years, which is good, as I seem to spend a lot of weekends there.

Sometimes it's a relief to know that for the next few days, all I have to do is cross the Woodrow Wilson Bridge into work, then back again in the evening.  All the same, it's pretty amazing that over the past two weekends, I have seen almost the entirety of my dad's side of the family, and Paul's mom's side of the family.  And that's kind of cool.

Mom and Dad pose in the frigid western Pennsylvania snow

That's all the profundity I can manage for right now.  I'm pretty worn out...must be time for another work week.

Twenty Years

Please forgive my long hiatus.  It has been a busy month, between state-hopping, holidays, job-searching and grad school applications.  I'm currently enjoying a relaxing stay with Paul's family in New Jersey.  My Christmas shopping is done (well, almost), my gifts are wrapped, and I'm getting a good rest before the baking-and-wrapping extravaganza that will be Wednesday and Thursday.  Come mid-January I will be starting a post-graduate certificate in Geographic Information Systems (yay!).  In the coming weeks and months I hope to have official news about jobs and graduate school.

In a previous post, I outlined the basics of repatriation and legislation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Act.  In honor of the 20th anniversary of NAGPRA, George Washington University held a symposium in mid-November.  Those two days were an illuminating experience, revealing the deep hurt difficult conflicts that are an inevitable part of the repatriation process.  Scientists, curators, and Native Americans spoke of their divergent experiences and perspectives.  It was a very moving experience - an chance to see human faces rather than the simply sherds and bones and dirt of archaeology.

The difficult: The sorrow of Native people whose continued efforts have been unsuccessful.  The hurt that has a place, even in successful repatriations.  The yet unresolved disagreements between scientists and Native people.  The inspiring: Beginning and ending each day with prayer.  Inspiring stories.  Academics and curators with the courage to admit wrong practices.  The opportunity to learn from the experience of so many others.

I continue to be glad that I decided to take time off before grad school.  I am learning so much from these unique opportunities, things I most certainly would have missed had I decided to push on through.  As I anticipate returning to the hotbed of academic theory and thought, I do not want to forget the human faces - the the human experience that unites us all, regardless of time period, culture, or language.

National Museum of the American Indian